New decade, new theme

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It has been almost a decade since this blog last saw a redesign.

This blogā€™s theme 2011 - 2020. RIP!

In these 9 years, my life changed dramatically. I joined and left W3C, joined the CSS WG, went to MIT for a PhD, published a book, got married, had a baby, among other things. I designed dozens of websites for dozens of projects, but this theme remained constant, with probably a hasty tweak here and there but nothing more than that. Even its mobile version was a few quick media queries to make it palatable on mobile.

To put this into perspective, when I designed that theme:

Over the course of these years, I kept saying ā€œI need to update my websiteā€™s themeā€, but never got around to it, there was always something more high priority.

The stroke that broke the camelā€™s back was this Monday. I came up with a nice CSS tip on another website I was working on, and realized I was hesitating to blog about it because I was embarrassed at how my website looked. This is it, I thought. If it has gotten so bad that I avoid blogging because I donā€™t want people to be reminded of how old my website looks, I need to get my shit together and fix this, I told myself.

My plan was to design something entirely from scratch, like I had done the previous time (the previous theme used a blank HTML5 starter theme as its only starting point). However, when I previewed the new Wordpress default (Twenty Twenty), I fell in love, especially with its typography: it used a very Helvetica-esque variable font as its heading typeface, and Hoefler Text for body text. šŸ˜

It would surely be very convenient to be able to adapt an existing theme, but on the other hand, isnā€™t it embarrassing to be known for CSS and use the default theme or something close to it?

In the end, I kept the things I liked about it and it certainly still looks a lot like Twenty Twenty, but I think Iā€™ve made enough tweaks that itā€™s also very Lea. And of course there are animated conic gradients in it, because duh. šŸ˜‚

Do keep in mind that this is just a dayā€™s work, so it will be rough around the edges and still very much a work in progress. Let me know about any issues you find in the comments!

PS: Yes, yes, I will eventually get around to enforcing https://!